Google BigQuery joins Big Data analysis contingent

Never one to shy away from a trend, Google go GA with their BigData analysis SaaS and the market trembles in fear at the cost-cutting choice

Big Data crunchers are all the rage at the moment, and now one
more, Google’s BigQuery has surfaced to try and make sense of the
Big Data you’ve amassed. After a period of limited availability
testing, Google have given the green light to BigQuery – their SaaS
aiming to make Big Data querying cheaper, faster and simpler.

In a nutshell, Big Query is a web service that lets
you do real-time interactive analysis of mammoth datasets, with
SQL-like queries — we’re talking billions of rows here. Hugely
scalable and easy to use, BigQuery could well entice enterprises
who previously were unwilling to shell out for other options, as
the service is being offered at a low cost.

This move could (emphasis on could) undercut other Big
Data options massively. BigQuery is a different breed to software
options like Hadoop and companies like Cloudera (both fundamentally
open source) or on-premise choices. This seems like an initiative
to bring smaller enterprises to the dance, those who don’t have the
investment for the more advanced analytics software options out
there.

On-premise options like Netezza and Vertica are fast
and powerful, but they will cost you…And with Hadoop, you need
more heads and you have to build out a custom Hadoop
system.

He also made the claim that during testing, BigQuery crunched a
client’s dataset 10 times faster than a Hadoop cluster. Whilst
there’s no empirical evidence to back that up, it might well be
true given Google’s compute power. It is an all-consuming
beast.

Kwek writes in the official annnouncement:

BigQuery is accessible via a
simple UI
or REST interface. It lets you take advantage of Google’s
massive compute power, store as much data as needed and pay only
for what you use. Your data is protected with multiple layers of
security, replicated across multiple data centers and can be easily
exported.

Although it was free in testing, Google have announced a
pricing plan now it’s gone big time – and it’s fair to say it’s
very, very reasonable.

With this release, Google could
just have sent a warning shot to other analytics players, by
bolstering their cloud arsenal. But it’ll take some pushing to
shift the likes of Amazon and IBM in this Cloud enterprise battle.
Whether it will attract the critical data enterprises also remains
to be seen…